Have you ever picked up a plant at the grocery store and wondered to yourself, can I really keep this alive? Or maybe you’ve planted seeds in the ground only to see them never sprout. Don’t worry, if you’ve struggled to find any success, you’re not alone. But imagine the pressure when the food industry’s supply chain is relying on your green thumb, so you have to find a way to plant trillions of seeds that yield crops covering millions of square miles to feed the world.. It’s no longer about having a green thumb. It’s a full on science and technology based operation, and it can’t fail. That’s where Bayer Crop Science and Elisha Herrmann step in to bring that supply chain to life.

“We produce not only the seeds that the farmers plant, but we have to produce the fruits and the vegetables that produce the seeds that the farmers plant.”

Elisha is a Global Supply Chain Strategy and Innovation Partner a Bayer Crop Science, a company that is currently utilizing all forms of science and technology, including drones, machine learning, artificial intelligence and robotics, to deliver the best produce from the moment seeds hit the dirt to the second you remove them from the shelves. On this episode of IT Visionaries, Elisha describes the unique ways Bayer Crop Science is utilizing technology to ensure quality from both ends of the supply chain, why blockchain is now an integral tool for the food industry when it comes to tracking and tracing products, and much more.

Main Takeaways

• Can You Track That: Being able to track the lifecycle of a plant is incredibly important when it comes to managing where certain plants and produce are shipped. If a plant or seed is infected with a fungus and is sent to a geographic location of the world that doesn’t have the resources to remedy the causes of that fungus, it could be detrimental in very severe ways.
• It’s Just Science: Artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies are used to track the overall health and life cycle of crops, but also to manage current and future food trends. By using A.I. and machine learning, scientists can let the growers know if they need to plan for different crops.
• Blockchain Grows in Necessity: A few years ago, most growers, suppliers, and distributors were tracking the whereabouts of their crops manually. This meant that regardless of where those crops ended up, the data they were inputting was done manually and could have discrepancies. With blockchain, they now have the ability to instantly track where their crops are going, to whom they are being shipped, and how they are getting there.

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